Groovy 1.0 RC2 was released today. If all goes well over the next few days the 1.0 release should be available by year's end. The community has been waiting a long time for this. All of the hard work and patience from the Groovy development team is about to pay off. Thanks Guys!

2
comments:

I don't really think of Groovy as a Java fork. I think of a fork as a copy that heads off in its own direction as an alternative to the original. Groovy's relationship to Java is not that. Like Java, Groovy runs on the JVM. In many places Groovy has a Java like syntax. However, Groovy really is a language of its own which didn't start as a copy of Java.

Groovy and Java play very nicely together. That turns out to be one of the big benefits that Groovy has to offer. From Groovy code it is trivial to access libraries written in Java which means your Groovy programs and scripts can easily leverage the great wealth of libraries that have been written in Java over that last 10+ years.

The Java Platform is a fantastic platform for deploying applications. While all along it has been possible to build applications for that platform in languages other than Java, almost all applications written for the platform have been written in Java. That is changing. I still expect the majority of applications running on the JVM will be written in Java but more and more enterprises are leveraging the power and flexibility of dynamic languages and as organizations head down that path, Groovy's ability to run on the JVM and easily access all of the Java libraries out there makes it very compelling.

I encourage groups to investigate Groovy and develop an understanding of the kinds of things that Groovy does really well. Grails is a framework for agile web development in Groovy and provides a great way to appreciate the power of a dynamic language on the JVM.